Former Bruin Still Showing a Deft Touch : Lee Takes Positive Approach as San Diego Teacher, Coach

He wore UCLA uniform No. 43 for the last time nearly 19 years ago, and now Greg Lee--one of the top schoolboy basketball players in Valley history at Reseda High--is carving his niche as a San Diego teacher and coach.

Twenty years have zipped by since Lee was the catalyst of what Coach John Wooden called his greatest Bruin team, but two decades have hardly affected this free spirit who still loves his alma mater but sometimes conceals his passion.

“(The Bruins are) going to upset Michigan and they’re going to get at least to the finals of the regional,” said Lee, 41. “If you believe that . . . I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

“And if anybody reads that statement, they won’t believe anything else I say. But that’s from the heart.”

Fading memories and new hopes come alive for Lee each time UCLA earns a berth in the NCAA tournament. But today he’s only another UCLA fan rooting for a Bruin uprising in March, keenly aware of the achievements of the John Wooden era--seven NCAA titles in a row, 10 total--might never be duplicated.

“I root for them every time I watch them,” he said. “For every alum and every ex-UCLA basketball player, it would be great if most of the best talent in America went to UCLA and we went undefeated and continued to win national championships. But it’s unrealistic in this day and age.”

UCLA is a subject Lee rarely ponders these days, as he coaches a varsity boys’ team at San Diego Clairemont High and is more concerned with recruiting future scholars for his college preparatory math classes.

“But when I start reading these things in the paper,” said Lee, “I’m aghast that they haven’t been to the Final Four since 1980. It’s staggering.”

He wears a different uniform now, but it’s the same ol’ Greg Lee: shorts, T-shirt, tennis shoes and a slightly longer Beatles haircut than Wooden would permit. Bouncy and upbeat, Lee is a pied piper leading inner-city teens to the river of ideals he discovered as a UCLA honors student.

Coaching and teaching at the San Diego city school is frustrating at times for Lee, however, and he sometimes wonders if he could have parlayed his education into something different.

But his parents are retired teachers and he plans on retiring as a teacher as well. His father, Lonnie Lee, coached Reseda for 25 seasons before retiring in 1980.

“It’s distressing to realize most of the students you teach can tell you the entire CBS-TV lineup and they’ve never read Sherlock Holmes--or just about anything,” Lee said. “My best calculus students don’t embrace the written word.”

At UCLA, Lee was a slow 6-foot-5 point guard who helped lead the fast-breaking Bruins to an NCAA-record 88 consecutive victories from 1971 to 1974 and national championships in ’72 and ’73.

“Greg was not quick, but he had great hands and he could deliver the ball,” said Swen Nater, a backup center with UCLA who, like Lee, teaches and coaches in San Diego. “Greg was one of the smartest players ever to play the game.”

Lee was a brilliant long-range shooter, but with seven future NBA players surrounding him, Lee was limited to passing, penetrating, playing pressure defense and throwing lob passes to Bill Walton.

“Greg Lee was the man that made it all happen for people like Keith Wilkes and myself,” Walton said. “Greg was the eyes, ears, mouth and brain of John Wooden on the basketball court.”

Off the court, he was much different. A student who would graduate magna cum laude in 1974, Lee felt the pulse of a generation that wanted to change the world. Outspoken about the Vietnam War and civil rights, a glib Lee often was quoted by the press.

“If we don’t overcome the feeling that the government knows more than the people, we’re going to continue to be isolated,” Lee told The Times his junior year. “Only collectively do the people have power. . . .

“You have 30,000 people walking around this campus and they all have their heads down. Nobody talks to anybody. . . . There are things wrong with the world--things I want to see if I can’t help do something to change.”

A special relationship blossomed between Lee and Walton, at the time college basketball’s most celebrated and perhaps most controversial player. They dined and vacationed together, they took part in campus demonstrations, and they made Wooden earn his paycheck.

“I didn’t want to cut my hair,” Lee said. “I grew it long when I could. I didn’t agree with the policies of Richard Nixon. But I didn’t call myself a hippy.”

Lee would report for basketball with his locks cut, but Wooden once sent the curly-haired Walton to the barber three times before a team photo.

“Bill tested Wooden more than any other player,” Nater said. “I don’t ever remember Greg testing Wooden. But he was the only guy who got away with teasing Bill.”

Lee did test Wooden his freshman year--possibly endangering a varsity promotion the next season. Billy Seibert, a seldom-used player, took the podium at the team awards banquet in 1971 and verbally attacked Wooden for slighting his reserves when the Bruins were blowing away opponents that season. Several teammates, including Lee, gave Seibert a standing ovation.

“I was applauding him,” Lee said. “He was 100% right.”

Two years later, Lee had grievances of his own.

“There were some times that I was very upset and disillusioned,” said Lee, whose playing time was cut for part of his junior season after a sophomore year in which he averaged 8.7 points.

“The team had incredible success, and all of a sudden I wasn’t playing as much as before.

“(But) when decisions started going not my way, I didn’t handle it well. Wooden had to deal with a lot of distractions from my generation, which makes his success even more remarkable to me.

“I see things a little differently now. You know the refrain from the Bob Dylan song (“My Back Pages”)? ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’ It’s about being opinionated and self-righteous, and later maturing and realizing everything was not as black and white as I thought it was.”

“The Walton Gang” was the name given to those Bruin teams, which carried a cumulative 3.5 grade-point average. Walton was the leader; Lee was his charismatic right-hand man.

Walton followed the Grateful Dead, ate granola and slept in a water bed atop the Alpha Tao Omega fraternity house--resting his big body under the stars. Lee bunked in the basement of the Phi Kappa Psi house, listening to Dylan and Neil Young, burning the midnight oil with Kurt Vonnegut novels and gaining a worldliness that could blow the minds of his teammates.

“I felt intimidated every time I talked to him,” said Nater, now basketball coach at Christian Heritage College. “If you want to talk to Greg, you better know what you’re talking about.

“But he was always positive with people. I only played three minutes a game, and Greg would be the one guy who would come up and say, ‘That was a great move you made.’

“That would just build me up.”

To this day, Walton and Lee cherish the alliance they struck when both arrived at UCLA in 1970--Walton coming from San Diego Helix High, where he was the state player of the year.

Lee had been one of only three boys to repeat as City Section player of the year since 1938. He averaged 20, 29 and 30 points a game at Reseda in three varsity seasons playing for his father (who also played at UCLA) but had to step out of the limelight for Walton at UCLA.

“He was a great teammate,” Walton said. “He is an unbelievable friend.”

But when it came to world concerns, Lee drew a line somewhere around the Santa Monica city limits.

The day Walton was arrested at a war demonstration on Wilshire Boulevard, Lee was playing volleyball at the beach. “It was too nice a day,” Lee said. “Bill was a shade more passionate politically than I was.”

In later years, Lee and Walton would vacation together in the mountains, the desert, on the beaches of Baja California, and on the Galapagos Islands.

“I remember how Bill and I watched the Lakers during their 33-game (winning streak in 1972-73) in the basement,” Lee said. “Chick (Lakers announcer Hearn) was going wild, Wilt seemed to be blocking every shot. . . .

“Practicing with John Wooden, having dinner with Bill, then going back and watching something like that. . . . It was a good time to be a basketball player.”

Lee had a two-year professional career, starting with the ABA San Diego Conquistadors in 1975 and ending the next year with Walton and the NBA Portland Trail Blazers. He later played four seasons of pro ball in West Germany, but by then his passion had turned to beach volleyball, where he and Jim Menges, a member of UCLA’s 1974 NCAA champion volleyball team, pioneered the sport.

If you ask Chris Marlowe, Olympic gold-medal volleyball player, sportscaster and a former high school foe of Lee’s, fame eluded the former Bruin. Lee dominated the beach much like UCLA did college basketball, winning 13 consecutive tournaments--a record matched last year by Kent Steffes and former Bruin Karch Kiraly.

“At one time, Greg was the best in the world,” Marlowe said. “I think he made under $5,000 in his career. He’d be a millionaire superstar today.

“Those 88 wins and 13 tournaments in a row tell you a lot about him. He made everybody around him play better.”

Marlowe’s Palisades team beat Reseda for the 1969 City title in Lee’s worst high school game (four-for-21 shooting). But Lee finished one vote ahead of Marlowe in the City player-of-the-year voting in 1969. Lee also won the award as a senior in 1970.

“Marlowe is close; I made probably a taste more than $5,000,” said Lee, who usually played for T-shirts and beer coolers.

“I did a few promotional appearances as an old-time celebrity last summer, and I was getting $2,400 just to do an interview and sign autographs.

“A high school teacher needs every buck he can get during the summer. I don’t feel cheated. The generation of volleyball players before me didn’t even get the free trunks.”

He paused at the notion of wealth.

“Maybe it was just my generation or the years we were going through, but I didn’t spend any time in college planning for the future. I was enjoying the basketball, the social life, school. . . . Maybe it was the weakness of our generation.”

Lee coaches basketball at the school that inspired Cameron Crowe’s book and the 1981 movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” The movie depicted an exaggerated setting in which the inmates ran the asylum.

Sometimes Lee appears too trusting to thrive in the chaos and apathy he encounters at the rough-edged city school. He shows up for games in T-shirts and shorts while his colleagues wear suits. He is committed, but casual.

Then again, players have stolen jerseys and balls out of the back seat of Lee’s car while getting a ride home from the coach.

In the eight seasons since he took over as coach, Clairemont has never won a league championship. It finished 10-18 this season, finishing with a 112-45 first-round loss to Serra after it sneaked into the playoffs.

“I would like to be Mahatma Ghandi and touch millions of people, but that was not meant for me,” Lee said. “But is it a sign of weakness or strength that I’m not conquering the world? Or is it a sign of intelligence to accept that you really like what you’re doing?

“Whole deal is, I like kids and I like teaching them and interacting with them. I like breaking off in the middle of a calculus or trigonometry lesson to talk about current events like this deal in (Waco) Texas. Some of the kids said they saw me on ESPN highlights this week. They think I played in the ice age because we couldn’t dunk.”

In fact, it was a golden age.

“It’s way long ago; it’s ancient history, according to the way my life is now,” Lee said. “But every spring, it sort of gets resurrected.

“I think UCLA can be really, really great (if the Bruins) start getting a higher percentage of the quality players from the Southland. And I hope things are getting more positive.”